Crowded White Spaces: Dîner en Blanc and the Place-Based Contingencies of Choreography

Abstract

This spatial and contextual approach to the performance of assembly takes Dîner en Blanc, an annual pop-up picnic, as a case study. Ethnographic and choreographic analyses of the 2018 picnic event in Vancouver, Canada, ground a critique of the dynamics of site specificity and host/guest relations that drive this local expression of a global event. Drawing on a range of performance and decolonial theorists, this place-based movement analysis of the event foregrounds the recolonizing implications of staging aesthetically whitewashed culinary choreographies on the unceded and traditional territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.